When it comes to labelling the re-writing relationship obtaining between postcolonial works of literature and their colonial predecessors, instead of speaking in terms of 'influence', which would imply a hierarchically construed historical relationship valorising the work in the 'mother' culture over its postcolonial counterpart, the author feels we would do better to speak of what he calls 'bound intertextuality', something that is stricter than a mere referential use of intertextuality, yet looser than what we usually label a 'translation'. Such bound intertextuality may manifest itself on all levels of the work of literature, including the use of genre. In the analytical part of this article, the author tries to show how Amitav Ghosh's 1992 In an Antique Land 'intertextually translates' Shelley's Ozymandias from a postcolonial perspective.